Organization: ICANN (most popular articles)

In a worrying turn of events, it appears that ICANN had no idea about the rejection of its bid for long-term running of the IANA contract prior to an announcement being posted on the NTIA's website today.

The organization - which has run the IANA functions for over a decade - is also waiting to hear why the US government feels it has failed to meet the RFP criteria that defined a new, more open approach to the contract.

In a series of sudden and unexpected announcements earlier today, the NTIA first announced it was canceling the entire rebid process for IANA, then that it was canceling it because no one had met its criteria, and then that it was extending ICANN's IANA contract for six months to give it time to re-run the RFP process.

ICANN was aware of the IANA contract extension, having held some discussions in recent days but it appears it was completely unaware that its RFP bid had been rejected - alongside any others that may also have bid - and still has no idea what the reasons are for the rejection.

ICANN has posted the minutes of its Board meeting last Thursday, 8 December, and has made a number of significant decisions.

The two most important were flagged up last week at a Senate hearing by senior vice president Kurt Pritz: that those who qualify for "applicant support" in the new gTLD process will pay $47,000 rather than $185,000; and that Board members will be banned from working for any new registries for 12 months, as well as be required to recuse themselves from votes on any applications in which they are connected.

What is new is the announcement of a "batching" process for the new gTLD program in case there are more than the estimated 500 applications (something that most industry observers are now saying is likely).

According to the Board minutes, the process for deciding what group will be evaluated first in the situation where there are more than 500 will be a "secondary timestamp".

ICANN’s 40th meeting starts next week in San Francisco. Here is a guide to the most important topics, listed in order of importance, with added commentary, background and links to relevant resources.

1. New generic top-level domains (gTLDs)

New gTLDs will yet again be the dominant topic for an ICANN meeting, as the Board continues its efforts to bring this five-year process to a close.

The San Francisco meeting will be dominated by discussions between the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and Board, continuing on from a two-day meeting in Brussels earlier this month.

Tomorrow, the new gTLD program will launch. And not before time.

Amid the celebrations from an industry that has waited years for this moment, and a Board and management team congratulating itself on having resisted fierce pressure to scale back its flagship program, it is likely that a two-page letter will go unnoticed.

If history is anything to go by, the letter will never make it past the organization's general counsel. It won't appear on ICANN's website, and its message will fall on deaf ears, disregarded as so many criticisms of the organization are by a staff that wallows in its lack of accountability.

And yet the letter, from the Chairman of the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition John Bell, brings with it a difficult and unpleasant truth that, unnoticed, could bring the organization down in just a few short years.

Letter sent earlier today to ICANN outlining the latest issues in the sorry saga of dot-jobs

Background: The ICANN Board had publicly announced that it intended to approve the Applicant Guidebook (the rules for new Internet extensions) at its Cartagena meeting in December 2010.

Shortly before that meeting, it received a blunt letter from United States Assistant Commerce Secretary Larry Strickling warning the Board that in the US government's view it was in no way ready to approve the Guidebook.

Mr Strickling and the Board then had a private meeting in Cartagena to talk through the letter and how to respond to it.

The transcript of that meeting was only made available after the Guidebook had been approved some six months later, and in response to a formal request under ICANN's document disclosure policy (DIDP).

The result of Strickling's letter and the subsequent meeting, transcribed below, was the creation of a 'GAC Scorecard' outlining all of the governments concerns (there were 81 of them), and a series of extraordinary meetings between governments and the ICANN Board in order to reach agreement.

BOARD with LARRY STRICKLING Meeting

7 December 2010, 6:30 pm

ICANN will announce its new CEO in April, the Board committee tasked with finding Rod Beckstrom's replacement has announced.

In an update on the ICANN website, the committee announced that it has carried out initial teleconferences with 16 candidates, having been sent a list of 27 from search company Odgers, Ray & Berndtson (see the Economist ad for the job).

From there, the committee will carry out face-to-face interviews with an unspecified "subset" of that 16 before putting a final slate of candidates in front of the ICANN Board for "intensive interviewing". The target completion date is mid-April.

What you really want to know is: who will it be? Well, we have have come up with our list of who we are pretty sure is in the running - and their chances of success. They are listed, in full, below.

ICANN will not delay the launch of its much anticipated program to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of new Internet extensions, nor run a limited ‘pilot program’, its chairman has told .Nxt.

Steve Crocker admitted that the organization’s Board will be holding a special meeting in the first week of January and that the meeting’s focus will be the launch of the new gTLD program the following week. But that meeting will not consider either a delay or a limited rollout, he stated.

Asked specifically about widespread calls for a “pilot program” that would feature only a limited number of Internet extensions, Crocker noted that the organization had already run pilot programs for expanding the top level of the Internet and argued that “we haven't seen anything to suggest there would be value in delaying the launch”.

An extensive and highly organized campaign in Washington DC this month has seen two Congressional hearings and a series of letters from Congressmen, the FTC, international organizations, and more than 150 large US corporations and associations about the program, most arguing for a delay or a reduction in size for the plans.

The US government has foreshadowed a major overhaul of how the top-level of the Internet is run in a “further notice of inquiry” to be formally published next week.